An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power Review

It's been a decade since Al Gore's wake-up-call documentary won the Oscar. And here he is, back with an update that looks at how climate change continues to alter the face of the planet. What's surprising is that this film is much more hopeful, exploring not just the threat but the things people around the world are doing to make life better for future generations. It's also a reminder that this isn't a debate: it's a question of how we respond to the fact that the world is indeed changing.

The film is beautifully assembled with gorgeous footage from around the globe, vividly offering imagery to back up the scientific facts, accompanied by Gore's narration, which carefully outlines the issue without blinding us with detail. It's a clever approach that focuses on the truth of what's happening, connecting issues of climate change with politics, economics and wars. The fact is that renewable energy provides more jobs and higher income than burning fossil fuels, but only where governments and big business have the sense to encourage them.

Filmmakers Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk keep things moving briskly, following Gore around the world to explore a variety of key situations: roads flooding regularly at high tide in Miami, glaciers melting in Greenland, the aftermath of superstorms in The Philippines and New York City, energy concerns in India, pollution concerns in China. While these scenes were shot over the past several years, they are edited out of sequence into a thriller-style narrative centred around the Paris climate summit in November 2015, where Gore engaged in some seriously touchy negotiations to secure a unanimous commitment from every country on earth.

The movie is also bang up to date with Trump's decision to withdraw from that accord, which has doubled the rest of the world's resolve. Throughout all of this, Gore draws lucid lines between politics and the issue, most insistently exposing the corporate donors and lobbyists who manipulate governments and lie to the public so they can continue to destabilise our ecosystem and make a quick profit at the expense of their children and grandchildren. In other words, the crisis here is about democracy. And if we are unable to clean up our corrupt leadership and get them to do the job they were elected to do without kowtowing to big business, then we need to get on with the work ourself. And as this film clearly reminds us, there are a lot of things we can do right now.